There was once a man who thought he was the cleverest man in the world. He thought he could understand things in a way that nobody else could and that he was always right. He would get up in the morning and his wife would say to him, ‘It’s a nice day today,’ and he would say, ‘It will be nicer tomorrow’ or ‘It’s too nice because of global warming’ or ‘No thanks to the government.’
When he ate his breakfast his wife would say, ‘Could you pass me the marmalade?’ and he would say, ‘You should always keep the marmalade where you can reach it’ or ‘You’ve had too much marmalade already’ or ‘The marmalade I bought from the shop is much better than this marmalade. I don’t know how you can eat it.’
After breakfast he would walk into town. He didn’t have any friends so he went to the library every day to read the newspapers because they were free in the library. He read all of them all the way through in alphabetical order. He read about US politics and share prices and air pollution and educational standards and new books and house prices and everything.
As he read them he wrote down in a little note book any word he didn’t know. Then he’d go to the reference section in the library because it was free and look these words up to see what they meant. When he found out what they meant he repeated the meaning three times to himself so that he would never forget it.
If he had any time left after this he would read the train and bus timetables so that he knew how to get home from anywhere in Great Britain on weekdays, weekends and Bank Holidays, and work out how much you would have if you changed a pound for a dollar to a euro to a yen and back to a pound. And strangely enough, it was never exactly a pound.
This way, he thought he could one day understand everything and predict what would happen in the future a long time before anyone else did. This way, he thought he could maybe make a lot of money or protect himself from getting flu or get out of doing any hard work or being made to look a fool. Secretly he was very much afraid of being made to look a fool. And also secretly, he was very afraid of other people, particularly children and old people.
One special day after he had been in the library all day he felt that he had finally managed it. He felt that now he understood everything in the world and no-one could fool him. It was raining when he stepped out of the library, as he knew it would be, so he turned up the collar on his important coat and started to walk home.
His house was at the top of a very steep hill but he liked the walk because he thought it made him super fit. Half way up the hill there was a bus stop and at the bus stop stood a little old lady with two big heavy bags of shopping at her feet. As he got closer to the bus stop he could see that the little old lady looked a bit worried and very wet and he was afraid she might ask him for help. She was so wet she looked like an apology somebody was making for something they’d got very wrong. And as he got closer still what he was afraid would happen, did happen. She asked him for help.
She said, ‘Excuse me,’ so he pretended not to hear her. But as he was passing her she said it again, ‘Excuse me,’ and this time he couldn’t pretend that, so he stopped and said, ‘Yes?’
And she said, ‘Do you know if there’s a bus due?’ and of course he did because he’d memorised all the bus timetables. There wasn’t a bus for 15 minutes but he didn’t want to say this to the little old lady because then she might ask him to help her in some way or start talking to him about something else and he really didn’t want to do that. ‘No. Sorry,’ he said and carried on walking, and as he was walking away from her she said, ‘Well, would you mind giving me a hand with these bags? I only live just up the hill.’
But he pretended again that he couldn’t hear her and turned his back on her and went on walking. He didn’t want to waste his time talking to a little old unimportant lady in the rain which was very important because it was getting him wet.
‘How rude,’ said the little old lady. ‘You think I’m just an unimportant little old lady but I could be very important you know.’ And he kept on walking. And she kept on talking. She said, ‘I could be someone’s mum. They’d think I was important. Or someone’s grandma. Or someone’s daughter.’ And he kept on walking thinking – crazy old lady talking to herself, nothing to do with me. ‘Or a secret millionaire. Or a witch.’ And he kept on walking. She said something else but he was too far away now to hear her. He turned the corner into his street.
His house was half way up the street and, as he looked up in the rain towards it, just in front of him, was a clown. Just a few yards away. A big, fat clown with a big stupid orange wig on and a red, white and blue costume. ‘How on earth did he get there?’ he thought, and ‘What’s he doing?’ The clown was dancing a strange sort of dance like a grandad at a wedding in Leeds but doing it backwards, so that as he walked up the street the clown danced up the street backwards in front of him. And then, just as he was going to turn into the path to his front door the clown turned backwards in front of him and started dancing right in front of his very important front door. What was going on? And now he could hear what the clown was saying. And it didn’t make any sense. The clown had an American accent and he was saying, ‘And I’ve done more for green people than anyone since Robin Hood and we had a bus company greater than the world had ever seen and nobody could believe it and they stole it off me because they were jealous because more people came to my christening than had come to anybody’s birthday party ever in the history of shoes.’ And more stuff like that, just as bad and just as silly.
This was very inconvenient, and he thought, ‘I’ll ignore him. I’ll ignore him and push him aside. And if there’s any funny business I’ll shout to my wife and she’ll call the police.’ So he walked in a determined way up to the front door and put up his hand to push the clown out of the way and something even more strange than having a dancing clown on your doorstep happened. The clown disappeared. Just went. Into nothing. He looked around. No. Nowhere. Not to be seen. Nothing.
He didn’t say anything about this to his wife, though. That would have meant he didn’t know something, so he couldn’t do that. He didn’t know what to think. Which was a very strange feeling for him and he didn’t like it at all. So he just tried to forget about it. He thought, ‘Maybe it was kids.’ Or ‘Maybe I was tired.’
So that night he went upstairs to get ready for bed. He always went to bed at the same time and he always put the timer on his phone so that he brushed his teeth with his electric toothbrush for 2 minutes 45 seconds. He put on his pyjamas and opened the bathroom door and he would have screamed or shouted or at least squealed. But he couldn’t because he was carrying his toothbrush in his mouth. There was another clown in the bathroom. Dancing. The same dance like someone dances when they’ve been to wrestling classes in Sheffield a bit too often. A different clown. This time it was fat in a white shirt that was obviously too tight and with a stupid, yellow wig and saying something like, ‘And I’ve got the best oven in all Ireland and I can beat the world when it comes to putting everything into a wastepaper basket and I can do anything and I actually like living in a fridge and don’t you point that wine at me Johnny Foreigner I like your cheese though and no-one could or should or would do anything else.’ It was all nonsense. He just stood there. It didn’t make sense. Then it all went black and the next thing he knew he was in bed and his wife was saying something about he must be working too hard.
He pretended that he had been lying down on the bathroom floor to test for woodworm and had just fallen asleep, but he was afraid his wife didn’t quite believe him. Anyway, he went to bed in the spare room. He said he thought there might be woodworm there too. But really he was a bit scared.
He lay there in the dark, with the cold, grey light from a full moon sneaking through a gap in the curtains and the duvet pulled up under his chin. What was happening to him? What did it all mean? He tried and tried to get to sleep but it was no good. About two o’clock he started thinking that maybe a mug of hot cocoa might be a good idea and by three o’clock he was absolutely convinced of it. So he got out of bed, put on his dressing gown and went downstairs.
He put the light on in the kitchen and was afraid for a second about what he might see. But no – okay – all normal – no clowns. He got the mug and the tin of cocoa and spooned the lovely dark brown cocoa powder into the mug and was glad that the hot cocoa would comfort him and make everything seem fine. So he went to the fridge for the milk and opened the fridge door and, oh dear me, no. There was a clown in the fridge. Dancing.
This clown was smaller than the other ones. It was dancing in the egg rack. It had a very smart suit on made of union jacks. It had grey hair which looked like it had been dipped in the grey stuff you get when you clear out the plughole in the bathroom sink, and then spread over its head with a spatula, apart from a couple of long grey hairs that stood up straight like aerials. Or like someone was having acupuncture and the doctor stuck those long thin acupuncture needles in their head and then they forgot about them and the person got fed up and nipped out for a pie at the baker’s and gave the woman in the baker’s a very nasty shock.
This one wasn’t frightening like the others. But the trouble was, it was twice as silly. Its dance was like a robot that’s been left out in the rain in Rugeley. Or like someone trying to dance to two different tunes at the same time. Its voice was like someone with a bad cold and you just wished they’d blow their nose properly. And all it said was, ‘I’m under new management you’re under new management he’s under new management she’s under new management it’s under new management we’re under new management they’re under new management.’ And there are sixteen tenses in the English language and it said this same thing in all sixteen and absolutely nothing else over and over and over again.
He sat down on the floor and, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he ate the cocoa powder out of the mug with his spoon. After a bit he shut the fridge door. This was terrible. His life was falling apart and he didn’t know what to do. And, for him, the not knowing what to do was worse than the falling apart bit.
He went back up to bed in a kind of daze and hardly noticed that both the yellow hair clown and the little grey clown were dancing together in the bathroom as he walked past. He got into bed and fell fast asleep.
Sadly, this went on for days. There were clowns in the wardrobe, clowns under the bed, clowns outside the window, clowns on top of the telly, clowns in the toilet, clowns in the bin, clowns sitting next to him at breakfast, clowns behind the sofa, clowns by the coat rack, clowns in the front garden, the back garden and across the road by the bus stop. His wife knew something was the matter because of the look on his face, but he said he just didn’t feel well. He stayed in and spent a lot of time in bed thinking it might all go away.
But it just didn’t.
So he decided he’d just try to ignore it and got up the next day and got himself ready and set off for the library. It wasn’t easy. There were clowns on every road and, to his horror, he found one of the little grey ones in his coat pocket. But at last he got there. The lovely, elegant, peaceful door of the library appeared, he pushed it open and the warm, booky smell that he loved so much rushed out to meet him. Safety, sanity.
But it wasn’t.
There were more clowns here than he’d ever seen before. They were in front of the bookshelves, on top of the bookshelves, little versions were actually on the bookshelves. Nobody else in the library could see them but he could. They were following every single person round and talking their absolute nonsense to them. They were even dancing in front of the kids in the story corner and three little versions of the yellow one were tap dancing in one of the children’s book boxes. It was awful. The place where he had always been safe wasn’t safe any more. Without caring who heard him, he yelled ‘Aaaarghhh’ at the top of his voice, turned right round and ran out of the building.
And he kept on running. Across the market square, past the town hall and up the hill. Clowns danced about him to the left, the right and in front. He ran up to them but as soon as he got near enough to touch them they disappeared and re-appeared a bit further ahead.
The trouble was he lived at the top of a hill so after a bit, about half way up he ran out of puff, bent his head to look at the ground and nothing else and started to walk home very slowly, dejectedly, like a one man procession of people who had absolutely no money and so couldn’t even afford a procession. The clowns danced and chattered around him adding nonsense to misery.
He looked up after a bit and saw the bus stop where the old woman had stood and there she was again with her bags of shopping but, obviously, with one of the yellow clowns dancing around in front of her. As he got nearer, she said, ‘Hello again,’ and he tried to say ‘Hello’ back but he was so miserable he’d forgotten how to pronounce it. And then she said, ‘Are these bothering you?’ And then she turned directly to the clown and said, ‘Oh bugger off,’ and swung her handbag and whacked the clown across the side of the head.
It was hard to say who was the more surprised – the man or the clown. They both looked shocked. Then a bus pulled up and opened its doors to let people out and the woman started clobbering the clown with her handbag again and shooed him on to the bus with ‘Get in there you stupid fake’ and ‘Don’t you try that on with me’ and ‘Go on, go on, and leave the poor English language alone.’
The clown got on the bus, dancing backwards and looking dazed. He tried to speak but just came out with a sound like ‘Phwaaah, phwaaaah, phwaaah’ or something similarly meaningless. The bus doors closed and the bus drove off. As it pulled away they could just see him starting to dance his way down the aisle, totally invisible to everyone.
‘That’s the town circular,’ said the old woman. ‘He’ll never get off. He’s condemned to go via Grab Lane to Cummings Road to the hospital and back for eternity. Or until the end of the County Council’s current schedules anyway. That’ll teach him.’
‘You. You. You could see him,’ said the man. ‘How did you…? What did …? I …. What? Can you help me with the others?’
‘Yes,’ said the old woman. ‘I can. Let’s do the orange ones first. Where do you live?’
The man pointed the way. He could see down the road in front of them there were five clowns; three little, grey ones and two big, orange ones. All the yellow ones had gone.
‘Is your wife in?’ asked the old woman. ‘No,’ said the man, ‘she’s at work.’ ‘All right,’ said the old woman. ‘Let’s go shall we? Do you mind carrying my shopping for me?’ ‘No, no. Not at all,’ said the man. He picked up her bags and they walked towards his house, the clowns dancing round them as usual. Well, not really very usual, but you know what I mean.
The old woman just seemed to ignore them, but just as they got to his house, she swung round towards the nearest orange one, looped the straps of her handbag round his neck, twisted them to get him in a snare and dragged him towards to the front door.
‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Put the shower on.’ The man ran up the stairs to the bathroom with the old woman behind him dragging the clown who was making gurgling noises. He opened the bathroom door and shower door and turned on the shower. Just as he did that the old woman threw the clown into the shower, untwisting her handbag from his neck.
The clown danced around in the shower but the old woman leant again the door so he couldn’t get out. ‘Is it on hot?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Good,’ she said.
The clown got wet and his bizarre orange combover came apart and dripped in two long thin strands either side of his bald head down to his knees. Then, as the man watched, the clown started to change colour. He went from orange to red, then white, then blue. Not only did he change colour, he started to get smaller, to shrink, to melt, to dissolve, until quite quickly, in a swirl of purple and lavender he vanished down the drain.
‘He’ll circulate,’ said the old woman, ‘in an entirely sustainable way. Forever. He’ll hate that. Now,’ she said, ‘we just need to catch one of the grey, domestic variety and the job’s done. There should be some downstairs. Have you got any oven gloves? They’re very greasy and slippery these ones.’
The man got her the oven gloves and they went looking for the little grey clowns who must have known somehow that something was up because they were all hiding. But they couldn’t stop saying ‘… under new management …’ and dancing so they didn’t stay hidden for long. There was one behind the sofa. It tried to run in a dancey, I-can’t-tell-left-from-right kind of way but the old woman grabbed him. ‘Microwave!’ shouted the old woman.
The man ran into the kitchen and opened the microwave door, the old woman threw the clown in and switched it on full power for two minutes. The clown looked surprised but then sat down and crossed its legs and looked for all the world like it was on television doing an interview on Andrew Marr and avoiding all the questions. It had always been grey, but now it got greyer and greyer and the colour in its union jack suit faded and it just looked like someone had been playing noughts and crosses on it on their own and so had only used crosses. And then it just faded away altogether.
‘That’s the last you’ll see of him,’ said the woman. ‘Except after midnight on Friday the 13th on YouTube if anyone’s careless enough to say “Blairism” three times.’
The man looked around. There were no clowns in the house. There were no clowns outside the house. They’d gone. He turned round to say ‘Thank you’ to the old woman but, of course, she’d disappeared too.
The man who knew everything didn’t understand what had happened. He never understood. And from that day he changed. He became the man who was interested in everybody’s opinion, who was always ready to help, who was always able to see things from other people’s point of view, who liked looking around him at the clouds in the sky and the cars on the road and the people in the queue at the fish and chip shop. Particularly the people. He didn’t spend too long at the library, but he still went there occasionally to read the bus timetables because you never know when they might come in handy.
